This book is a real-life documentary of two of these challenges, and their eventual successful outcomes and their discoveries; but more than that it is an adventure story in ideas, and the surprising synchronicity that is the Daily Lot of the postmodernist wandering scholar. Read-on and enjoy the journey.

M. C. Beaton meets Miss Marple in the second book in the Laetitia Rodd Mysteries, which sees Kate Saunders's Victorian detective on the hunt for a missing Oxford academic. In 1851, private detective Laetitia Rodd is enjoying a well-earned holiday when she gets an urgent request for her services. Mrs. Rodd's neighbor Jacob Welland is a reclusive, rich gentleman dying of consumption, and he wants Mrs. Rodd to find his brother, who has been missing for fifteen years. Joshua Welland was a scholar at Oxford, brilliant, eccentric, and desperately poor when he disappeared from the university. Friends claim to have seen him since, in gypsy camps and wandering around the countryside. But the last sighting was ten years before-when Joshua claimed to be learning great secrets from the gypsies that would one day astound the whole world. Mrs. Rodd travels to Oxford and begins to search for the wandering scholar. But as she investigates, Mrs. Rodd discovers something dark-and extremely dangerous-lurking in the beautiful English countryside. For readers of James Runcie, Alexander McCall Smith, and M. C. Beaton, Laetitia Rodd and the Mystery of the Wandering Scholar is a delightful new mystery about Victorian England and an indomitable female detective.

Hogarth's 1896 travel narrative illuminates the relationship between archaeology and politics in the build up to the First World War.

'A Dickensian glow pervades this immensely satisfying novel. Hugely enjoyable' James Runcie, author of 'The Grantchester Mysteries' 'Saunders's prose is precise and a pleasure to read. The plot twists and turns, and Laetitia is a warm and engaging heroine' The Times The first in the delightfully cosy and clever mystery series featuring private detective, Laetitia Rodd. Winter, 1850. Mrs Laetitia Rodd is the impoverished widow of an Archdeacon, living modestly in Hampstead with her landlady Mrs Bentley. She is also a private detective of the utmost discretion. When her brother Frederick, a criminal barrister, introduces her to Sir James Calderstone, a wealthy and powerful industrialist, she is tasked to investigate the background of an 'unsuitable' woman his son intends to marry – a match he is determined to prevent. In the guise of governess, she travels to the family seat, Wishtide, deep in the frozen Lincolnshire countryside, where she soon discovers that the Calderstones have more to hide than most. As their secrets unfold, the case takes an unpleasant turn when a man is found dead outside a tavern, and Mrs Rodd's search for the truth takes her from elite drawing rooms to London's notorious inns and its steaming laundry houses. Perfect for fans of The Thursday Murder Club, M.C. Beaton, Jessica Fellowes and James Runcie.